Marcel Marchon’s Blog

Jürg Stuker, on December 5, 2005 @ 2:28 am

Email encryption is like people taking lukewarm showers… Where’s the thrill.

To be honest: For me the weakest link is alway somewhere else… I love cryptography, but I used email encryption just twice because of a customer requirement (and a friend of mine is bulding a startup in this domain but it din’t work we me: http://www.privasphere.com/)

But no chain letters

Peter Hogenkamp, on December 5, 2005 @ 4:51 am

I tried email encryption once around five years ago by downloading and installing PGP. Didn’t know *anybody* to exchance encrypted email with, so I never ever used it productively.
Let me quote Tim Dührkoop here (who does not blog, but is occasionally featured): “The problem about email encryption is that the people tech savvy enough to handle it have nothing really secret to day, and those who do send emails that deserved to be encrypted are too busy to bother.”

When I look at people’s email signatures, how many link to their private keys? 1%? Clearly not enough for it to take off.
I would jump on something at that early stage, if it thought it had the potential, but this one doesn’t - so far.

From my perspective, the only way to change this is a nice little scandal, following which corporations would enforce encrypted email as company policy, forcing MS to build it into Outlook, thus eventually leading to a new Outlook release with an Auto-Key-Generator-Assistant at first startup. Only then, I would go through the certainly painful process to find out how it works with Lotus Notes.

Scott, on April 17, 2006 @ 7:07 am

In my small business I need to encrypt maybe 1 out of 20 email that I send. I don’t have an IT dept. The benefit I want is to send the email from my computer, to the receiving computer, and I want the receiver to be able to open my message without installing special software. I spent weeks trying different solutions, and finally just began encrypting files in zip format. Then I found Messagelock (www.encryptomatic.com) which encrypts my Outlook email and attachments into a zip file. Anyone with Winzip installed can access the contents of my message, without special software. For anyone who’s got a small shop but who needs to get a message from A to B securely, check out MessageLock. For me it provides 98% of the benefit that I need, with about 1/100th of the hassle of PGP.

Tim Dührkoop, on September 21, 2006 @ 1:23 pm

I do blog occasionally, so here my take on this: I think the pressure for encryption will really pick up when the first major security issue comes up on the Blackberry service. This is the one people sending the really secret stuff are using, and it just makes me feel uncomfortable to see all this email forwarded through one proprietary system …